Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Fast Forward

Assassinated al-Qaida leader al-Zawahri tried to make Jews into Islam’s ‘greatest adversary’

Ayman al-Zawahri, killed by a CIA drone, authored a study on Jews that helped train Osama bin Laden’s focus on the U.S.

The al-Qaida leader killed in a CIA drone strike this weekend authored a 1998 study that claimed Jews controlled the U.S., a treatise that caught the attention of Osama bin Laden and led him to focus more intently on American targets. 

Terrorism experts describe Ayman al-Zawahri, 71 — who led al-Qaida after the 2011 assassination of bin Laden — as the organization’s brains. Before he partnered with al-Qaida, al-Zawahri led his own militant groups, including the World Islamic Front for Jihad against Jews and Crusaders, a coalition that encouraged Muslims to assassinate “Americans and their allies.” He advocated for particularly violent tactics, including suicide bombings, and argued that for the cause, the killing of innocent civilians was justified. 

“It was a philosophy that was meant to encourage murder and hatred. And it did,” said Dr. Tawfik Hamid, a medical doctor and former fundamentalist who now speaks out against Islamic extremism. 

Egypt-born al-Zawahri was motivated, his writings show, by Israel’s defeat of its Arab neighbors in 1967. His study, Hamid said, helped spread the idea that Muslims should fear Jews and considered Jews to be Muslims’ “greatest adversary.”

In November 2001, two months after the 9/11 attacks, al-Zawahri went on television and said “our jihad, with the help of Allah, will continue until we liberate our holy places from the American-Jewish aggression in Palestine and the rest of the Arab world.”

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse..

Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.